A diagnostic imaging arrangement which includes positron emission tomography (PET) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is known from the paper ‘Frame misalignment-induced errors in PET studies: an investigation on strategies for correction’ by S. Sechet et al in the Nuclear Science: A Symposium Conference Record November 2002 Vol. 2 pp. 1330-1334.
The cited reference concerns the problem of motion artefacts that can corrupt data analysis in a PET study. The known approach creates an artificial PET transmission image for the 3D target from the reconstructed magnetic resonance image. The artificial PET transmission image derived from the magnetic resonance image mimics the spatial response of the PET system. Then a frame alignment algorithm is applied between the PET transmission image and a PET emission image to align the transmission and emission images.
This known approach is limited in that only mis-registration between transmission and emission data is taken into account. Moreover, the known approach requires a large computational effort in reconstruction of various (intermediate) images.